Poets Laura Purdie Salas and Janet Wong have known each other for several years, but mostly in an online, task-driven environment, for example, serving on the board of the Children's Literature Assembly (CLA) and cochairing the 2014 CLA Master Class on Poetry Across the Curriculum (Salas et al., 2015). They strengthened their bond by interviewing…

Reflecting on a day of dangerous bushfire conditions in NSW, I recount my leadership responsibilities as a principal, highlighting the shaping force of my English teaching past in my response to certain managerial demands that I faced. I illustrate how the sense of ethical responsibility and a commitment to openness that came to define my…

In this response to Peter Medway's paper, "English and Enlightenment' (Changing English 17:1, 2010), I take issue with little of what he so lucidly writes, except his implicit and occasionally explicit denunciation of Romanticism as the proper basis of English pedagogy. I am concerned in this paper to emphasise the positive aspects of…

From September 2008 to July 2009, the author traded academic robes for the Army Combat Uniform issued to US Navy personnel deploying to Afghanistan. Along with using the ceramic and Kevlar body armor he learned to don at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he metaphorically defended himself from the disruption to his personal and professional life that…

After more than three decades of telling students that, unlike fiction, poetry is detached from the world of commerce, floating in a zone where certain pressures, including money, do not obtain, the author has begun to rethink his stance. Although poetry yields no cash in a literal sense, poets talk metaphorically about "banking" poems, allowing…

Among the responsibilities of international educators is to help students begin the process of identifying the foreign in their new environments in order to learn from it. The major obstacle for Americans studying abroad in developed economies, especially in English-speaking countries, is to become sensitive to the subtleties of foreignness. The…

The author responds to the essays in this special issue by noting that they emphasize the importance of careful, complex comparisons between Western and Chinese rhetorical traditions.

Last year, the author and his students received word that their beloved professor of queer and American ethnic studies was going on terminal leave. He and his students were suddenly thrown into the position of making the case for queer studies to the broader campus community. In this article, the author shares how their professor's departure--and…

Three English teachers share their ideas on how their work as a writer helped them as a teacher. One teacher has found that the desire for meaningful response to her own writing has led her to evaluate her students similarly. A second teacher discusses how personal experience translates into teaching how to convey rejection in a useful and tactful…

Two months before he died, John Keats claimed he had been poisoned. Although most scholars and biographers have attributed Keats's fears of persecution, betrayal, and murder to consumptive dementia, Keats's suspicions had begun long before 1820 and were not without some justification. In this article, the author talks about the death of John…

Walt Whitman defies ontology: he strives to be eternal, to journey ever in the now, and thus to forswear beginnings. And there is a great deal of "place" in Whitman, space both concrete and metaphorical, Alabama and Maine, body and "kosmos." But Whitman the man was born in Huntington, Long Island, which is a good a place to start exploring how…

In this essay, the author asks, "What can the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley teach us about arts education today?" In Shelley's time, no one was yet worried about improving math, reading, or SAT scores. Nevertheless, there was an implication in the rise of the sciences that educators were even then beginning to confront: What, some…

This paper is written in a personal capacity and mainly takes the form of a poem--in five sections--composed as a response to some of the ideas in the article by Hannu Heikkinen and colleagues in this same issue of "Educational Action Research": "Action research as narrative: five principles for validation". The poem takes its…

This article argues that poetry written by nineteenth-century British and American deaf poets played an important role in the period's sign language debates. By placing the publication of this poetry in the context of public exhibitions of deaf students, I suggest that the poetry was mobilized to publicly defend the linguistic and intellectual…

Presents nominations for James A. Autry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Andrei Codrescu, James Dickey, Allen Ginsberg, Andrew Hudgins, Linda Pastan, and Margaret Walker as poet laureate. (RS)